An auction at

21st May 2013

In support of

50: Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit / Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

London: Pandora Press, 1985

8vo, first edition, original printed wrappers, slightly frayed at head of spine

Her first book. A girl is adopted into an evangelical family in the North of England. In the author’s words: “it exposes the sanctity of family life... illustrates by example what the church calls love is actually psychosis and it dares to suggest that what makes life difficult for homosexuals is not their perversity but other people’s.”

Winner of the Whitbread Award for a First Novel and Costa First Novel Award in 1985. Winterson adapted the novel for the 1990 BBC television three part series Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, directed by Beeban Kidron and starring Charlotte Coleman, Geraldine McEwan, Kenneth Cranham and Cathryn Bradshaw. Winterson’s screenplay won the 1991 Prix d'Argent, Cannes.

Annotated on 36 pages. Approximately 950 words.

Sold with

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

In this memoir of Winterson’s early life, she revisits the territory covered by the novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, but is much more forthcoming about the rather grim details of her childhood. “It is the story of how the painful past Jeanette Winterson thought she had written over and repainted returned to haunt her later life, and sent her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her real mother.”

Annotated on 22 pages. Approximately 250 words.

Very excited by these end-papers. The end of a story should suggest the start of the next one. I come from Lancashire – the looms. I feel I break the thread and tie it again. There is a length of cloth – the book – but when the thread is cut, like Atropos cuts it, it begins again. Another cloth...